The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Arvind Gupta

340 Pages·2002·2.14 MB·English

The Dancing
Wu Li Masters
An Overview of the New Physics
Gary Zukav
A BANTAM NEW AGE BOOK
BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND
This book is dedicated to you, who
are drawn to read it.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to the following people cannot be adequately
expressed. I discovered, in the course of writing this book,
that physicists, from graduate students to Nobel Laureates,
are a gracious group of people; accessible, helpful, and
engaging. This discovery shattered my long-held stereo-
type of the cold, "objective" scientific personality. For
this, above all, I am grateful to the people listed here.
Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D., Director of the Physics/Consciousness
Research Group, is the catalyst without whom the following
people and I would not have met. Al Chung-liang Huang,
The T'ai Chi Master, provided the perfect metaphor of Wu
Li, inspiration, and the beautiful calligraphy. David
Finkelstein, Ph.D., Director of the School of Physics,
Georgia Institute of Technology, was my first tutor. These
men are the godfathers of this book.
In addition to Sarfatti and Finkelstein, Brian Josephson,
Professor of Physics, Cambridge University, and Max
Jammer, Professor of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-
Gan, Israel, read and commented upon the entire manu-
script. I am especially indebted to these men (but I do not
wish to imply that any one of them, or any other of the
individualistic and creative thinkers who helped me with
this book, would approve of it, page for page, as it is
written, nor that the responsibility for any errors or mis-
interpretations belongs to anyone but me).
I am also indebted to Henry Stapp, Ph.D., Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory, for reading and commenting upon
ix
x / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
portions of the manuscript, and to Elizabeth Rauscher,
Ph.D., founder and sponsor of the Fundamental Physics
Group, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, for encouraging
non-physicists to partake of weekly conferences which
normally would attract only physicists. In addition to Stapp
and Sarfatti, this group included John Clauser, Ph.D.;
Philippe Eberhard, Ph.D.; George Weissman, Ph.D.; Fred
Wolf, Ph.D,; and Fritjof Capra, Ph.D,; among others.
I am grateful to Carson Jefferies, Professor of Physics,
University of California at Berkeley, for his support and
for commenting upon portions of the manuscript; to David
Bohm, Professor of Physics, Birkbeck College, University
of London, for reading portions of the manuscript; to
Saul-Paul Sirag for his frequent assistance; to the physi-
cists of the Particle Data Group, Lawrence Berkeley Labo-
ratory, for their assistance in compiling the particle table at
the back of the book; to Eleanor Criswell, Professor of
Psychology, Sonoma State University (California), for her
valuable support; to Gin McCollum, Professor of Mathe-
matics, Kansas State University, for her assistance and for
her patient tutelage; and to Nick Herbert, Ph.D., Director
of the C-Life Institute, for providing me with his excellent
papers on Bell's theorem and for permission to use his
paper title, "More than Both," as a chapter title.
All of the illustrations in this book were done by Thomas
Linden Robinson.
Harvey White, Professor Emeritus, Department of Phys-
ics, University of California at Berkeley, and former Di-
rector, Lawrence Hall of Science, personally provided
photographs of his famous simulations of probability dis-
tribution patterns. The electron diffraction photograph was
provided by Ronald Gronsky, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory. I learned much about spectroscopy from Sumner
Davis, Professor of Physics, University of California at
Berkeley. I am deeply grateful to these men who, like all
of the physicists that I encountered in writing this book,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xi
gave graciously of their time and knowledge to a stranger
who needed help.
I also am indebted to Maria Guarnaschelli, my editor,
for her sensitivity and erudition.
Without the generosity of Michael Murphy and the Board
of Directors of the Esalen Institute, which sponsored the
1976 conference on physics and consciousness, none of
this probably would have happened.
Table of
Contents
Synoptic Table of Contents xv
Cast of Characters xix
Foreword by David Finkelstein xxiii
Introduction xxvii
WU LI?
Big Week at Big Sur 3
Einstein Doesn't Like It 18
PATTERNS OF ORGANIC ENERGY
Living? 45
What Happens 67
MY WAY
The Role of "I" 91
NONSENSE
Beginner's Mind 117
Special Nonsense 134
General Nonsense 160
xiii
xiv / TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 CLUTCH MY IDEAS
The Particle Zoo 191
The Dance 212
ENLIGHTENMENT
More Than Both 255
The End of Science 281
Notes 315
Bibliography 323
Index 329
Particle Table 340
Synoptic Table
of Contents
WU LI? (Introduction)
Big Week at Big Sur
Physics (3), Esalen (4), Chinese and English (5), Wu Li
Masters (7), scientists and technicians (9), the sodium spec-
trum (10), Bohr's model of the atom (12).
Einstein Doesn't Like It
The new physics and the old physics (18), Newton's physics
(21), the Great Machine (22), do we create reality? (28), the
myth of objectivity (30), subatomic "particles" (31), statistics
(33), the kinetic theory of gases (33), probability (35), the
Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (37), prag-
matism (38), split-brain analysis (39), summary of the new
physics and the old physics (41).
PATTERNS OF ORGANIC ENERGY
(Quantum Mechanics)
Living?
Organic and inorganic (45), Max Planck (48), "discontinuous"
(48), black-body radiation (50), Planck's constant (51), Albert
Einstein (52), Einstein's theory of the photoelectric effect (53),
waves, wavelengths, frequencies, and amplitudes (54), diffrac-
tion (58), Young's double-slit experiment (60), the wave-par-
ticle duality (64), probability waves (65).
What Happens
The procedure of quantum mechanics (67), the region of prep-
aration (68), the region of measurement (68), the observed
system (69), the observing system (69), the Schrodinger wave
' xv
xvi / SYNOPTIC TABLE OF CONTENTS
equation (70), observables (70), particles as "correlations" (70),
wave functions (73), probability functions (73), quantum jumps
(75), the Theory of Measurement (76), the metaphysics of
quantum mechanics (80), the Many Worlds Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics (83), Schrodinger's cat (85), Doubting
Thomas (88).
MY WAY (Quantum Mechanics)
The Role of "1"
The "in here—out there" illusion (92), complementarity (93),
Compton scattering (93), Louis de Broglie (96), matter waves
(96), Erwin Schrodinger (99), standing waves (99), the Pauli
exclusion principle (103), the Schrodinger wave equation
(again) (104), Max Born (105), probability waves (again) (106),
the quantum model of the atom (107), Werner Heisenberg
(109), the S Matrix (110), the Heisenberg uncertainty prin-
ciple (111), the tables are turned (114).
NONSENSE (Relativity)
Beginner's Mind
Nonsense (117), the beginner's mind (118), the special theory
of relativity (L20), the Galilean relativity principle (123), iner-
tial co-ordinate systems (123), Galilean transformations (125),
the constancy of the speed of light (127), the ether (129), the
Michelson-Morley experiment (130), FitzGerald contractions
(132), Lorentz transformations (133).
Special Nonsense
The special theory of relativity (134), "proper" and "rela-
tive" length and time (139). Terrell's rotation explanation of
relativistic contraction (142), relativistic mass increase (144),
simultaneity (145), the space-time continuum (149), the space-
time interval (150), Hermann Minkowski (154), mass-energy
(154), conservation laws (156).
General Nonsense
Gravity and acceleration (161), inside and outside the eleva-
tors (163), gravitational mass and inertial mass (167), the geog-
raphy of the spacetime continuum (168), Euclidean geometry
SYNOPTIC TABLE OF CONTENTS / xvii
(171), the revolving circles (172), non-Euclidean geometry
(175), Einstein's ultimate vision (179), Mercury's perihelion
(180), starlight deflection (181), gravitational rcdshift (182).
Black Holes (184), the illusion of "force" (186), the illusion of
"nonsense" (187).
I CLUTCH MY IDEAS (Particle Physics)
The Particle Zoo
The barriers to change (191), the hall of mirrors (192), the
new world view (193), particle physics (195), bubble chambers
(195), the dance of creation and annihilation (196), what made
the tracks? (198), quantum field theory (199), the need to
pretend (201), particle masses (202), massless particles (205),
charge (206), spin (207), angular momentum (207), quantum
numbers (210), anti-particles (210).
The Dance
Space-time diagrams (212), Fcynman diagrams (214), the dance
of creation and annihilation (again) (215), anti-particles (again)
(217), the illusion of time (219), entropy (221), virtual photons
(222), the electromagnetic force (225), Hideki Yukawa (226),
the strong force (226), virtual mesons (228), self-interactions
(229), gravity (233), the weak force (234), virtual photons
(again) (234), vacuum diagrams (240), conservation laws (241),
symmetries (243), quarks (244), the S Matrix (again) (245).
ENLIGHTENMENT
(Quantum Logic ^Bell's Theorem)
More Than Both
Physics and enlightenment (255), Bell's theorem and quantum
logic (257), John von Neumann (257), the description of a
wave function (257), "Projections as Propositions" (,259), Da\ id
Finkelstein (261), symbols and experience (261), logos and
mythos (261), the distributive law (263), polarization of light
(264), the third polarizer paradox (267), superpositions (270),
quantum logic (271), "proof" (271), transition tables (273),
lattices (275), von Neumann's disproof of the distributive law
(277), quantum topology (280).